Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 6: Orte und Theorien

GP 6.1: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 21. März 2017, 14:00–14:45, HSZ 105

The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Cold War science diplomacy — •Karl Hall — Central European University

Shortly after war's end a Soviet scientist toured German institutions and reported, "Russia emerged victorious from the war thanks to the courage and heroism of its people and the high level of its science and technology. All of this forces the Germans to take an interest in the Russian people and its science, which has succeeded in smashing German militarism and showing the superiority of our system of labor organization and government." That early confidence gave way after 1949 to more complex diplomatic challenges on two fronts, as the Soviet Union sought to project an image of peaceful atomic capabilities in the West with the help of politically reliable physicists (Geneva 1955), while also cultivating scientific ties between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the scientific institutions of the newly socialist countries of East Central Europe. The responses of Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and East German scientists were by no means uniform, and even in cases of strong bilateral interest there were many obstacles to collaboration. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna eventually became the highest profile scientific collaboration in the Warsaw Pact, and the story of its formation in the wake of these halting international initiatives will dominate this brief narrative of early Soviet science diplomacy during the Cold War.